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An Arizona boy with a Hispanic last name was killed in Iraq this week. He was nineteen, a fun-loving teenager just a year out of high school. Unlike my GI generation of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, he wasn't drafted. He went willingly and proudly to serve the United States, a country that had welcomed and embraced his immigrant parents from Mexico.

I won't discuss all the cultural and political implications of this young boy's life and death here. That's for politicians and soapbox orators. I just want to say that his family's loss reminds me of a poem I read more than 60 years ago. I believe it was in the US Marine magazine, "Leatherneck", probably in a late 1945 issue.

However, when I searched the magazine's internet pages, there were no references that the poem, nor any indication that it ever existed. On further research, I found on another website that the title may have been derived from a similar British poem written about a young soldier who died in World War I.

I wish I could recall the actual poem, but I do remember that it had been written by the dad of a Marine killed on Iwo Jima. The dad's words mixed his terrible heartbreak about losing his child with his feelings of some comfort that he could always remember the boy at the wonderful age of nineteen. As with all boys his age, at least he had lived a joyful moment in time when he was filled with happiness, family love and high hopes for the future.

I can only hope the family of the Hispanic-American teenage GI who died recently in Iraq, as well as all the other GIs who have given their lives there, can also find find some of the same contentment along with their great sorrow. My wish for them is that they remember that wonderful boy as .... forever nineteen.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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